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Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The
label ‘Shakespeare of Bhojpuri’ might sound like a tongue-in-cheek
oxymoron to those who are unfamiliar with Bhikhari Thakur’s legacy, but
it’s only befitting for a man who happened to be the sole vanguard of an
entire cultural movement. Kamlesh Pandey calls him the Aadi-Purush
(protoplast) of Bhojpuri (i.e. the language of western Bihar) literature
and folk art.

Undoubtedly, the most popular Bhojpuri playwright, lyricist, singer,
performer and theater-director Bhikhari Thakur continues to rule hearts
after more than forty years of his death.

BIRTH

Bhikhari Thakur was born on December 18, 1887 in Qutubpur (Diyara) of
Saran district (Bihar) to Dal Singar Thakur and Shivkali Devi. He also
had a younger brother named Bahor Thakur. Bhikhari grew up learning his
father’s occupation and went to Kharagpur to earn his livelihood as a
barber. Within a few years he had started to feel a creative urge as his
fondness for Ramlila kept on growing. He went to Jagannath Puri to
imbibe the art and upon his return, formed a theatre group in his native
village which started performing Ramlila.

Thakur was also drawn to blazing social issues and soon, started to
address those in his freshly written theatrical pieces in his own
innovative style. On being asked why he took to writing plays, Thakur
had once answered in an interview - “I would watch Ramlila in which
Hrishi Vyas gave sermons to people; I also thought I could give sermons
to my folks!”

Bhikhari Thakur wrote plays on contemporary themes suffused with songs,
dance and a lot of humor. What he learnt while doing Ramlila, along with
his inherent histrionics, came handy in his new ventures. His plays
would captivate thousands of villagers throughout the night. Thakur was
on his way to create what today is considered as his biggest
contribution to Bhojpuri culture - the folk theatre form of Bidesia.

Bidesia

The literal meaning of the term Bidesia is ‘the one who has become a
foreigner’. In 1917, Bhikhari Thakur had originally performed a play
about the agony and endless wait of a newly-wed village bride whose
husband goes off to another city to earn money. The theme which
portrayed migration as the root cause of misery found such an immediate
echo with the social reality that this play, after minor variations,
gathered the status of an independent folk form named Bidesia.

This form is heavy on elements like songs, dances and heightened drama
which are characterized by ballad style singing, melodrama, comedy,
regional wits and a strong element of poetry rendered on a high note. A
performance starts with a dance aiming to attract a large audience and
once the viewers have settled down, the actual play unfolds. Pathos is
the dominant mood of Bidesia while all the female roles are played by
the male cast. A show requires no more than three or four actors, who
double up for several roles. Bidesia continues to be popular in the
villages of Bihar, as its theme remains relevant, reflecting a reality
of rural life where men have to migrate and families have to live in
agony. It remains the most popular and refreshing relaxation for a big
section of Bhojpuris.

Other Important Plays

Along with Bidesia, many of Bhikhari Thakur’s plays acquired widespread
recognition and later, also got published. He wrote and directed about a
dozen of plays including:

Thakur sensitized his audience against the ills of the widespread custom
of selling young girls by their fathers to older men for marriage. This
custom prevailed in Bihar until quite recently. Mr. Kamlesh Pandey
shares his own memories of watching Beti-Bechva and says, “I still
remember the lyrics of a song from this play. It goes like this –

The girl is saying to her father – “You counted the money, and the way a
goat is sold to the butcher, you sold me to an old man.”

In those days women were not allowed to watch Nautanki and whenever this
play would be staged, while all the men would watch it, women would sit
together somewhere close by and sob hearing these lines!”

Bidhva-Vilaap

Here the story is an extension to Beti-Bechva. The play portrays the seclusion a widow had to suffer for no fault of her own.

Bhai-Virodh

Three brothers are separated on the instigation of a conspirator before
they realize the importance of togetherness only after a lot of harm has
been done.

Kalyuga- Prem

Bhikhari Thakur exposes the ills of alcoholism when the lone wage earner
of a family becomes a drunkard and his deeds run his family into
troubles.

Ganga-Asnan

A man and his wife take a pilgrimage to the Ganges but are mean to his
old and weary mother. At the banks of the river the mother goes missing
while the wife is seduced by a Sadhu with the promise of giving her a
son. In the end the man finds them both and begs his mother for
forgiveness.

Gabar-Dichor

Galij returns to his village only to find his wife having an
illegitimate son named Dichor with Garbari. After initial quarrels
Galij, his wife and Garbari raise their individual claims on Dichor. The
Panchayat decides that Dichor would be divided into three pieces. At
the final moment the mother gives up her claim to save her son’s life.
The Panchayat sees the light and Dichor is allowed to stay with his
mother.

Literary Style

Through his plays, Bhikhari Thakur not only gave voice to the deprived
woman but also provided a great relief to the poor migrants. He openly
spoke against casteism and used satire to great effect to propagate his
progressive ideas.

In one of his plays he writes - “Jati Hazzam More Kutubpur Mokam.
Jati-Pesha Bate, Bidya Naheen Bate, Babujee”. Here he laments that
people of his caste would distribute letters without knowing their true
importance.

Bhikhari Thakur’s plays were not only popular in Bihar but also in big
cities like Kolkata, Patna and Benares where there is a big population
of migrant laborers. Thakur had also performed in countries like
Mauritius, Kenya, Singapore, Nepal, British Guyana, Suriname, Uganda,
Myanmar, Madagascar, South Africa, Fiji, Trinidad etc.

Sharing his thoughts on Thakur’s literary style Mr. Pandey says – “He
had a keen eye for all that which went on in the surroundings. By
profession he was a barber and lived in a small hut. What I have heard
is that he would keep his razor and a notebook with a pencil stuck up in
the canopy. That way he would switch between using the tool to serve
his customers and giving shape to the array of thoughts running in his
mind.

He was the first writer of Bhojpuri who acknowledged the truth of his
times and aimed to bring down the evil customs of the society. It’s
fascinating that he gained tremendous popularity despite working with
folk art, which is essentially considered as an entertainment medium. He
dealt with serious cultural issues through his plays.”

Legacy

Bhikhari Thakur died at the age of 84 on July 10, 1971. One would not be
wrong in calling him the founding father and flag-bearer of Bhojpuri
music and storytelling. A film has also been made on his play Bidesia,
by the same name (Bidesiya, 1963, Directed by S.N. Tripathi), which
starred Sujit Kumar and Jeevan. Today, there is a drama institute in
Patna founded in Thakur’s memory along with several awards and
felicitations which are given every year in his fond remembrance. Talk
about the songs of Bidesia to a lover of Bhojpuri theatre and his eyes
would light up as he starts to hum. The great nostalgia with which
Bhojpuri singers sing all those melodies also speaks volumes.
Unfortunately, it’s been observed that since Thakur’s death his style is
being continuously exploited by the Bhojpuri music industry for
producing gawky songs.

Kamlesh Pandey sums up the issue with these words “Today, when films
have presumably become a medium to shove out cheap entertainment, is it
possible for Bhojpuri cinema to draw inspiration from Bhikhari Thakur
and realize that even entertainment value can go hand in hand with
social concerns. He set an example that even a medium of entertainment
can be used to highlight important issues and thus, cause social
awakening. The question which I pose is; can the Bhojpuri Cinema take up
the challenge to produce an heir to the Shakespeare of Bhojpuri?”

It was 1972, and the Indian New
Wave was coming along nicely. The government-funded Film Finance
Corporation (FFC) was handing out loans to directors who wanted to break
away from the escapist and formulaic movies being churned out by the
Hindi movie dream factory. Some film-makers were more interested in
nightmares, among them M.S. Sathyu, who had earned a name for himself
lighting and designing sets and directing plays for the stage. A script
submitted by him to the FFC was rejected, so he handed in another one—a
story about a Muslim family that chooses to stay back in India after
Partition in 1947 but gets uprooted from within in the process.

Balraj Sahni plays Mirza Salim, the family patriarch, in Sathyu’s film

That script became Garm Hava,
one of the best-known examples of cinema about Partition. Sathyu’s
directorial debut is routinely included in “Best Films” lists, but its
finely etched characters and deeply felt humanism have been largely
hidden from public view since its theatrical release in 1974. The movie
disappeared from sight—no VHS tapes or DVDs were made—surfacing
occasionally on Doordarshan. All that will now change with the
completion of a privately funded restoration process that started over a
year and a half ago. A restored version of Garm Hava will be
re-released in theatres within the next few months. The picture and
sound quality in the close to 200,000 frames that make up the movie have
been individually treated. The original negative has been cleaned up,
and the sound has been digitally enhanced to suit the latest formats.
“It’s like a new film now,” says Sathyu.

The rebirth of Garm Hava is
the result of passion, doggedness, and deep pockets. The process was
started by Subhash Chheda, a Mumbai-based distributor who runs the DVD
label Rudraa. Chheda approached Sathyu a few years ago, asking for
permission to produce DVDs from the film’s negative. The negative had
aged badly and was damaged in many places. The idea then took root of
expanding the scope of the project—to re-release the film in theatres
and re-introduce audiences to its sobering pleasures.

“The film was visually corrected
in consultation with Sathyu,” Chheda says. “We have also upgraded the
sound. Dolby digital, 5.1, whichever format is there, the film is now
available. People should not feel that they are watching a dated film.”

The
project, which cost 100 times more than the movie’s budget, was
bankrolled by Pune-based developer R.D. Deshpanday, whose businesses
include the company Indikino Edutainment Pvt. Ltd. Indikino ploughed
close to Rs 1 crore into the restoration, supporting its picture
spruce-up by Filmlab in Mumbai and the sound quality improvement by
Deluxe Laboratories in Los Angeles, US. “The voice enhancement alone has
cost us a fortune,” Deshpanday says. “It’s like adding sugar to milk
and then separating the milk from the sugar.” He wants to organize
domestic and international premieres of the movie, and has approached
Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles for a screening. A book titled History’s Forgotten Footnote,
written by journalist Satyen K. Bordoloi, will be released along with
the movie. Blu-ray discs and DVDs are also in the pipeline.

“We are keen on bringing other
timeless Indian classics to the surface,” Deshpanday says. “The film
touches upon a very live subject. If you show Garm Hava today, anybody will think it’s a contemporary film. It has that kind of depth and timelessness.”

The attention lavished on Garm Hava is
a bit ironic, considering that the film nearly didn’t make it to movie
halls. The Mumbai office of the Central Board of Film Certification
rejected the film, citing its potential to stir up communal trouble.
Sathyu used his contacts to approach the then prime minister, Indira
Gandhi. She ordered the film to be released without any cuts. But even
the all-powerful Gandhi—she was only a year away from imposing Emergency
on the nation and revoking the democratic rights of citizens—couldn’t
ensure a smooth theatrical release. “N.N. Sippy took up the film’s
distribution, but he backed out when we showed the film at a festival
ahead of its release,” Sathyu says. “I eventually approached a friend in
Karnataka who owned a distribution company and a chain of cinemas, and
he released the film first in Bangalore.” Only then did other
distributors step in to ensure that movie goers saw for themselves the
tragedy of a Muslim family that opts for India over Pakistan.

A poster of the film

Garm Hava is about choices and consequences. Salim Mirza, a shoe
manufacturer in Agra, has elected to stay back in India after Partition,
but his decision gradually tears apart his family. A prospective
son-in-law migrates to Pakistan, while business suffers because lenders
don’t want to advance money to Muslim traders who may up and leave
without repaying their debts. His daughter, Amina, decides to marry a
suitor, but has her heart broken a second time when he too migrates. The
Mirzas lose the mansion in which they have lived for generations. Salim
Mirza is plagued by self-doubt. Should he have left in 1947 itself?
Where is home—and what does it mean to be a Muslim in India? The movie’s
original title was Wahaan.

Shama Zaidi, Sathyu’s wife and the
screenplay writer of several Shyam Benegal films, based the script on a
conversation she had with Ismat Chughtai, the Urdu novelist who has
written extensively on Partition. Chughtai shared with Sathyu and Zaidi
accounts of her family members, including an uncle who worked at a
railway station and watched Muslim families gradually leave India in
hopeful search of a better welcome across the border. The couple showed
the script to poet and writer Kaifi Azmi, who wrote the dialogue and
added to the screenplay his experiences of working with
shoe-manufacturing workers in Kanpur.

The movie was made on a minuscule
budget even by 1970s standards—a loan of Rs 2.5 lakh from the FFC and Rs
7.5 lakh borrowed by Sathyu from here and there. Like so many movies
produced on the margins of the Hindi film industry, Garm Hava was
made possible by the kindness of friends. The film was shot by
cinematographer Ishan Arya—also making his debut after working in plays
and advertisements—with a second-hand Arriflex camera loaned to the crew
by Sathyu’s friend, Homi Sethna. Sathyu’s involvement with the Leftist
Indian People’s Theatre Association (Ipta) resulted in parts for many
actors from Ipta troupes in Delhi, Mumbai and Agra. The only real star
on the set was the venerated Balraj Sahni in the role of Salim Mirza.
Sahni, whose immensely dignified performance is one of the movie’s many
highlights, was paid Rs 5,000 for his efforts. Shama Zaidi doubled up as
the costume and production designer. Ishan Arya co-produced the film
apart from creating its memorable images, which include a lovely moment
of Amina and her new lover, Shamshad, consummating their relationship on
a riverbank opposite the Taj Mahal. “We were all in tune with the kind
of film we were making,” Sathyu says. “Ideologically, we were all alike
and that is important.”

Before: The film’s restoration cost nearly Rs 1 crore

The
cast included Geeta Kak as Amina, Jalal Agha as Shamshad, Shaukat Kaifi
as Amina’s mother Jamila, and Farooque Sheikh, also making his feature
film debut as Sikander. Sheikh was 24, and was completing his law degree
alongside appearing in Ipta productions. “We were the young and useless
lot at Ipta—we used to act in small roles and shift backstage
furniture,” he says. “The FFC gave Sathyu a loan that was inadequate, to
put it mildly, and that too, in bits and pieces, so he was looking for
people who would work for free or very little money. It was a real
labour of love.” Sheikh was paid all of Rs 750 for his role as Sikander,
Salim Mirza’s rebellious son—his signing amount was Rs 150. “The film
made history, and my contract must have too,” he says.

Despite having a pool of Ipta
actors to dip into, Sathyu struggled to find the right woman to play the
small but pivotal part of Salim Mirza’s aged mother. He wanted to cast
the Hindustani classical singer Begum Akhtar, but she turned down the
role. Help came from unexpected quarters. The Mirza mansion, a symbol
both of the family’s social standing and their fall from grace, was
hired from a Mathur family. “The man who owned the house told me that
previous generations of his family had patronized dancing girls,” Sathyu
says. “I felt that these dancers must still be around in Agra, so I
asked Mr Mathur to take me to a brothel.”

After the restoration

The
brothel was run by an old woman who used to be a prostitute. After much
persuasion—and vociferous denials that they were film-makers rather
than customers—she opened the door to Sathyu and Mathur. Her name was
Badar Begum. “When I asked her if she would act in my film, she started
crying,” says Sathyu. Badar Begum told the director an incredible story
of how she always wanted to be an actor. She ran away to Mumbai at the
age of 16 to work in the movies, ran out of money, managed to wangle a
part as an extra in a Wadia Movietone film, used her payment to return
to Agra and eventually became a prostitute. “She did her part very well
even though she was in her 70s and nearly blind because of cataract
problems,” Sathyu says. Her voice, however, was dubbed, by the actor
Dina Pathak. The dialogue and background sounds in the movie were filled
in after the shoot at a studio in Mumbai. “The whole film was shot
silent, and the sound dubbed in post-production because we couldn’t
afford recording equipment,” Sathyu says.

Garm Hava was a personal
milestone but also something of a millstone for Sathyu, who is now 82
and lives in Bangalore. “When you hit a peak with your first film,
everything else you do is compared to it,” he says. He has made nine
feature films in different languages, including Hindi and Kannada, and
is trying to cobble together the finances to make a multilingual
musical. He continues to work in theatre, and will stage a production of
the Ipta classic Moteram Ka Satyagraha in Mumbai on 7 September. “Garm Hava is
a sentimental story—it brings tears to people’s eyes, which is what
people like,” he says self-deprecatingly about his debut.

Apart from showcasing a gem from
the treasure trove of Indian cinema, the restoration refocuses attention
on Indian New Wave cinema, which produced serious-minded,
issue-oriented films against severe odds. The collective approach that
made Garm Hava possible, the monetary sacrifices by its cast and
crew, and the passion for creating cinema that leads to social change
have all but vanished. The creative ferment of the time is nicely
captured by Ipta member and actor Masood Akhtar in his feature-length
documentary Kahan Kahan Se Guzre, which will be shown in Mumbai
in August. Akhtar’s film contains valuable information about Sathyu and
the theatre scene of the 1970s and 1980s as well as personal insights
into the director (his real name is Sathyanarayan, he is a charming
flirt, his daughters call him “Sathyu” rather than “Daddy”.) “I consider
myself his assistant, and the film is my tribute to him,” Akhtar says.

The documentary ends with the dramatic but appropriate Latin words “O tempora! O mores!” Thanks to the restoration of Garm Hava, the times and the customs of a near-forgotten phase of cinema will return, if only briefly.

**************

Separate lives

From Ritwik Ghatak to Yash Chopra, our leading film-makers have variously interpreted Partition

Ritwik Ghatak’s ‘Megha Dhaka Tera’

Indian
cinema has focused on Partition deep enough to merit the subgenre
“Partition cinema”. There are the movies of Bengali director Ritwik
Ghatak, who confronted head-on the trauma caused by the division of
Bengal into West and East Bengal (which later became Bangladesh). His
debut Nagarik, made in 1952 but released only in 1977, deals with
the misery of a family that migrates to Kolkata from East Bengal. The
theme of geographic and spiritual displacement is further explored in Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961) and Subarnarekha (1962). In 1973, Ghatak revisited the country of his birth with Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, about fisherfolk who live on the banks of the Titas river in Bangladesh.

The division of Punjab has featured directly and obliquely in the works of Yash Chopra. Dharmputra
(1961) spans the period before and after independence. Shashi Kapoor
plays a Hindu fundamentalist who discovers that he is actually a Muslim
who was adopted by Hindu parents at birth. In Chopra’s Veer-Zaara (2004),
Zaara comes to India to immerse the ashes of her Sikh nanny. She falls
in love with a Hindu pilot, who later crosses the border to find her. It
is said that every Hindi movie about children or siblings separated
from their family members is actually about Partition. Could the
earthquake that splits the family of Kedarnath in Yash Chopra’s Waqt (1965) actually be an indirect reference to Partition?

There is no such coyness in Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001),
Anil Sharma’s chest-thumping and eardrum-shattering movie about the
romance between a Sikh man and a Muslim woman during the tumult of 1947 .
A saner, and altogether quieter movie told from the Pakistani
perspective is Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2003). Set in the
1970s, the movie recounts the dilemma of a Sikh woman who marries the
Muslim man who abducts her, but is forced to confront her past when her
son becomes a religious fundamentalist. Pinjar (2003),
Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s glossy adaptation of Amrita Pritam’s novel, is
also about the experiences of a Punjabi Hindu woman whose family rejects
her after she is abducted by a Muslim man.

Literature has given film-makers ample material to work with. Pamela Rooks’ Train to Pakistan (1998) is based on the Khushwant Singh novel, while Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1998) is taken from Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man. Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas,
a novel about pre-Partition madness in Amritsar, led to Govind
Nihalani’s television series of the same name—one of the best ever works
on the period.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Irrfan Khan resists
being labelled. It is limiting, says the actor, whose search for more
meaningful roles continues despite the overwhelming affirmation from
critics and audiences alike

Away from the hustle and bustle of mainland Mumbai rests a quiet
stretch of land dotted with leafy palm trees that sway in the winter
breeze and monstrous old buildings that are being renovated into hotels,
resorts or residential complexes. Called Madh Island, the area is not
only far but also far removed from B-town’s usual cacophony. Its famous
resident, Irrfan Khan, is looking for just that.

Cut off from
what he calls the corrupting influence of “a movie-city like Bombay” on
an artist, Irrfan, 46, inhabits—and defines—a world of his own, just
like in his movies. Dressed impeccably in a white blazer and slim-fit
grey trousers, beard trimmed to perfection, hands gently rolling a
cigarette—something he “got hooked on” at the National School of Drama
(NSD)—he settles down for a chat with Forbes India.

The
tranquility of the place is unmistakable and Irrfan’s husky-voiced
intensity rips through it as he dwells on his craft, the soul-wrenching
efforts that go into his effortless performances, and his never-ending
quest for contentment as an actor. “What I am looking for still eludes
me,” he says. Even after a host of unforgettable films, wide
recognition and multiple accolades, he is looking for “stories that can
really engage me” and “take me forward”.

The cause of this lack
of fulfillment, he says, “is a continuous struggle to find my kind of
story… such a story where I have a great experience and give the
audience a great experience. And for that you need a storyteller.” Is
there a dearth of storytellers who can fascinate an artist of his
calibre? “There are many promising new directors but it is time they
were more ambitious and started telling stories that have resonance all
over the world,” he says.

It is this need for a “universal”
brand of cinema that he has stressed upon in his visits to a gamut of
film festivals this year, including the prestigious event at Cannes
where he was hailed for his compelling performance in The Lunchbox. He reckons Indian audiences are evolving and “they need different kinds of films and experiences”.

He wears the acclaim of The Lunchbox
on his sleeve. “It is the first Indian film that was released like an
English film [in terms of scale] across the world,” says Irrfan, who was
a co-producer. But as an actor, not playing his age was “a tedious
process”.

“To look like that, to think about it, how to age
myself, I don’t sleep, I booze, I do this, I do that… you don’t want to
do that thing [and] be in that zone,” he says. This isn’t the first time
he has played an old man—and felt unpleasant about it.

In 2011, for the HBO series In Treatment,
he played a widower paralysed by the grief of losing his wife and at
the same time battling pangs of cultural displacement when his family
brings him to the US for treatment. Irrfan says, “It was very difficult.
I haven’t faced that kind of complexity in my life. I didn’t know from
where I would bring that experience of pain.”

In 2006, in Mira Nair’s sublime celluloid adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Namesake—a
film that established him as an actor of repute in the Western world—he
played a professor who ages from a reticent young fellow to an
unobtrusive old man. “I never enjoyed that phase… playing that age and
feeling that age in your body when your agility is challenged. I hated
it,” he says.

****

The actor has
often felt “stifled” by the intense process of acting. “Earlier I used
to look for a method. At NSD, they asked you to find a posture which
would lead you to the emotion of a scene. It was among the various
techniques they taught. But I could never connect to that,” he says.

He
kept looking for triggers that allowed him to slide into a character
and experience all its emotions to the fullest. He cites the example of Maqbool (2003),
Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation of Macbeth and one of Irrfan’s most
memorable films. “During that scene where Tabu is lying dead, something
happens to me when I suddenly realise that this woman has brought me
till here and she has left… she is gone!” he says. “I was going through
grief as an actor. And because you are creating that grief, you start
enjoying being in that state.”

In another Bhardwaj film, 7 Khoon Maaf (2011), Irrfan
plays an effeminate poet by day who turns into a wife-assaulting beast
by night. He struggled to determine the “emotional core” of the
character. “I kept asking Vishal ki isme kya hai? [what is in it?]” he says. Right before a shot one night, he heard an Abida Parveen ghazal that helped him “find the contradictions, complexities and compulsions” of the man. “There was no connection between the ghazal and the character. It was just a trigger,” he says.

****

Irrfan
believes there are two selves at work while acting. “The process of
acting bifurcates and creates another person in you. One becomes the
observer while the other is the performer,” he says. “You are losing
control [as the performer] and letting yourself flow but you are still
in control [as the observer].”

Rarely does one come across an
actor who analyses his craft so scientifically and manages to
deconstruct the process so convincingly. Time magazine puts it
aptly in a 2012 essay: “By eschewing Bollywood frivolity and focusing on
his craft, Irrfan Khan has won the right to be considered the finest
Indian actor of his generation.”

Irrfan says he only attempts
to give the character “a proper culmination and appeal”. But some roles
are already complete like the one in Paan Singh Tomar, a film
that won him the National Award last year. “For certain roles, you have
to grow and find the character. But when Tigmanshu Dhulia [the director]
narrated Paan Singh Tomar to me, it was just there. He was standing in front of me,” he says.

He
finds it most rewarding when audiences are overwhelmed by his
performances. “The way the audience relates to your work and the way it
stays with them is the most precious thing. That is the reason you are
an actor,” he says.

But the fiercely self-analytical actor is
irked when audiences praise him for a role in which he “felt nothing”.
He says, “Sometimes people love your performance but you know that you
never experienced anything. What is it they like so much?”

He
also has an aversion to epithets even if that is of a “fabulous actor”.
He feels “caged” by tags. He says, “The industry is eager to put you in
an image so that they can use you. They want to define you as soon as
possible. I feel claustrophobic when any definition is put on me.”

Nonetheless, unfettered praise has marked Irrfan’s journey. Oscar-winning director Ang Lee called him a “unique actor” after Life of Pi. Danny Boyle, who directed Slumdog Millionaire,
said he is “beautiful to watch” and compared him with an athlete who
could execute the same move perfectly over and over again. Legendary
film critic Roger Ebert termed his work “subtle” and “engrossing”.
Amitabh Bachchan called him an “incredible performer” in Paan Singh Tomar.

****

Today
I don’t need to communicate to the industry that I can engage,” says
Irrfan with a sense of pride. But the restless actor can’t wait for more
“engaging scripts”. He has turned producer to play an active role in a
transitioning industry. “I don’t want to keep waiting for good stories.
If I see a possibility of making an engaging film, I would rather take
charge and make my own,” he says.

Will he direct too in the near
or distant future? “When I watch cinema what attracts me is people’s
behaviour more than the story. My natural inclination is towards acting.
I can’t direct,” he says.

His latest film Qissa, a
“hard-hitting” Partition tale, was screened at the recently concluded
Abu Dhabi Film Festival and Irrfan is quite upbeat about it. “This film
has Indian, German, French and Dutch producers. So it gives us a kind of
visibility in the European market,” he says.

While sections of
the media are quick to anoint him the first truly “crossover” Indian
actor who has found favour with influential Hollywood studios, Irrfan is
keen to work with the new crop of desi directors who are making waves
with non-formula films. “Dibakar Banerjee, Shoojit Sircar, Shimit Amin,
Sujoy Ghosh, Sriram Raghavan… they are all promising. They just need to
find their ground and their stories,” he says.

For an actor who
is eternally hungry and hunting for “something beyond”, the sky is the
limit. Perhaps Irrfan Khan won’t settle for even that.

This article appeared in the Forbes India magazine of 27 December, 2013

The
brief was the same this year. A mail was sent to the usual cinema
comrades who write, contribute, and help in running this blog. It went
like this – a) Close your eyes b) Think of all the films you have seen
in 2013 – released/unreleased/long/short/docu/anything c) Think what has
stayed back with you – impressed/touched/affected/blew d) Write on it
and tell us why. Ponder like Jep Gambardella in right gif, and write
about the joy you experienced like the left gif.

Almost everyone wanted to write about The
Great Beauty. It has emerged has a clear favourite this year. But since
the idea is to cover as many films as we can, so only one person was
allowed to write on a specific film. Though we ended up having two
writers on TGB. Finally, here’s the massive list of 17 terrific films
picked by 15 film buffs, and they tell us why these films stood out from
the rest. If they don’t look familiar, click on their handles. It’s
linked to their twitter accounts.

(Our earlier post in the same series – 20 Things We Learnt At The Movies and 13 Unanswered Questions is here, Top 10 Musical Gems We Discovered This Year is here)

What do you do when a bald, tipped-hat
wearing character, straight-out-of-Jeevan’s gang, writes to you and his
other Versovian gang-members an underground email in which he threatens
to squash your sperms, a la Uma Thurman did to the eyeballs in Kill
Bill, unless you close your eyes, think of your favorite film of 2013
and some such shit…?

You shit. And you sit on your laptop.

My pick: the best film that stayed back.

A spoilt schoolboy, his unemployed father
and pregnant mother, who tries in vain, to survive her pre natal pangs
and the annoying habit of the males in the house leaving urine on the
toilet seat, form a small middle-class family of three in a quiet
province called Ilo Ilo in Singapore. Well, not three. Actually four.
Terry, a modern and resilient maid, walks into this family and battles
the boy-bully, combats the mother’s territorial jealousy and earns the
respect she deserves from the senior-most member of the family.

There is nothing innovative about the
plot. No melodrama. In fact, zero drama. Yet, Anthony Chen’s debut film
left me spellbound. The unbelievably realistic performances, the
emotional nuances, take it right into Asghar Farhadi territory. And what
holds the film together, is Angeli Bayani’s portrayal of the Filipino
maid. Chen’s silent close-ups of Bayani’s deeply emotive face and
haunting eyes stay with you, long after the lights come on.

I’m not sure we’ve seen a better film
about the fluid nature of identity and sexuality, that too from India.
And this complex question of who we are is explored through a simple
nature versus nurture plot.

A story of a girl raised as a boy.
Because the father (Irrfan Khan) has always wanted a boy and is in
absolute denial about who she really is. Tillotama Shome is just the
kind of ballsy woman for the role and casting an actress in the
stereotype-defying gender-bending character is just one of the many
triumphs of Qissa, which is full of twists that are introduced not to
shock but to explore the question of identity, layer by layer. Saying
anything more may just ruin the film for you. You might have issues with
the titular ghost that pops up but that’s exactly the kind of ingenuity
that makes you think about the question raised in the film. With Tisca
Chopra and Rasika Duggal in the cast, this is as solid as an Indian film
has got in ages, especially from the arthouse circuit!

Since, I suspect, no one is going to
write on a Hollywood movie being their choice of best film on MFC, I
will. And also because Rush was one kick-ass film that literally
gave me a rush and had me applauding at the end of it: physical
reactions that no other film in 2013 managed to evoke.

There really isn’t much to say about Rush
that hasn’t already been said. I used to be a fervent F1 fan (less now
but still enough to be in the grandstands of the first Indian GP) and
for sure that’s contributed to my admiration of Ron Howard’s expertly
crafted drama. He is a director, I admit, I find hugely inconsistent
(only cared for Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon besides epic television
Arrested Development) but with Rush, the slate’s wiped clean.

Just unearthing the story – James Hunt vs
Niki Lauda – must’ve been a moment of triumph for screenwriter Peter
Morgan. But some scripts are expensive to tell and it was an arduous
journey for Morgan’s spec(!) effort before Howard got involved.

Besides the incredible rivalry that
Howard’s captured in moments of pure cinema, the authenticity of period
F1, and spectacular visuals (especially those of the final race in Japan
in high-speed rain) that haven’t made a home in my mind for all these
months; Rush encapsulates everything that Formula 1 is about –
adrenaline and utter disdain for subtlety. Not the usual qualities in,
what we have come to expect, a “good” film.

For someone who watches movies for a
living, it’s very hard to pick ONLY one great movie from a pile of
superlatives. More so, since 2013 fared rather well in my eyes and I
didn’t ‘ummm’ even once on being asked for my pick of the lot. Wadjda,
with its inspiring theme and touching simplicity, is that shiny gem from
Saudi Arabia that gets my vote. Ever since I saw its first trailer
among a hoard of others nominated by their respective countries, vying
for a place under Oscar’s Best Foreign Film category, I was drawn to the
beatific smile of a 10-year-old (an extraordinary Waad Mohammed)
essaying the title role. Notably, Wadjda is the first film to be shot
entirely in Saudi by filmmaker Haifaa Al Mansour who directed outdoor
scenes from inside a van using a walkie-talkie adhering to the country’s
stern filming restrictions for a woman/filmmaker and the first film
from the nation to send an entry to the Academy.

Right from the first scene where Wadjda
steps forth sporting a pair of Converse sneakers in a crowd of Mary
Janes, you know she stands out in a conservative, controlled society.
Set in suburban Riyadh, Wadjda deals with a young girl’s determination
to realise her dream of buying a bicycle after her mom refuses to do so.
How she chooses to achieve her seemingly defiant goal by appeasing the
same society and its doctrinal requirements is deftly portrayed in
Mansour’s lovingly crafted feature. Also heartwarming are the
interactions between Wadjda and her best friend, Abdullah. Unlike the
grown-ups in the story, their friendship is untouched by the
discrimination of their environment. Wadjda offers a palpable glimpse in
Riyadh’s daily life, the anxieties and facades of its striking women,
the deep-rooted conditioning of its self-engrossed men as well as the
innocence of its blithe children without trying to be overtly cynical or
judgmental. Through Wadjda’s mini triumph, Mansour astutely endorses a
message of hope and her personal belief that change might be slow but it
is steadfast and most imminent.

This was a year of turbulence for me.
Lots of emotional ups and downs, fights, illnesses, personal and
professional extremes, and a feeling of ‘ab hum bade ho gaye hain’.
Mid-life crisis started hitting its opening notes this year, that
slideshow of ‘80s/90s kids will remember this’ left me sadder rather
than happier, some very good friends got separated from their better
halves, some others got lost in the black-hole of their corporate jobs
and/or parenthood, a favorite relative passed away, a cricketer I loved
as a kid retired and I didn’t feel a thing, and a pet parrot flew away
leaving me heartbroken.

And may be that’s why, no other film
moved me as much as ‘The Great Beauty’ this year. A film about passage
of time and people, relations disintegrating, dissolving into the great
circus of bizarre the life is. Paulo Sorrentino’s latest, which I
watched twice on big screen during this year’s MAMI (god bless Mister
Narayanan, the festival director), had everything I would ideally like
to associate my ‘end of days’ with –humor, acidic care-a-damn criticism
of (modern) ideas of success and art, deep nostalgia, detachment, quest
for beauty, spiritualism, and an affirmation that it’s all, after all,
just a trick.

2 films that I saw this year (one at TIFF
and another at IFFI viewing room) should be the most talked about
international and Indian films respectively next year in my humble brag
opinion. Ned Benson’s ‘Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Her’ is a
delicate, sensitive, brilliantly written and acted, mind-bending drama
of a couple’s separation shown through the perspectives of him and her
in two films of 90 minutes each. Think of it as Sam Mendes meets Asghar
Farhadi. The layers of interpretation become thicker and mindboggling if
you change the order of viewing from ‘him followed by her’ to ‘her
followed by him’. And that, you’ll see, is a masterstroke.

The best Indian film I saw this year, and
hopefully the whole of world will see soon, is Kanu Behl’s ‘Titli’.
Seeing it on a desktop computer in IFFI, Goa’s ‘viewing room’ should be
counted as an underwhelming, far from ideal setting, and still, this
very dark very funny very depressing dastaavez on patriarchy BLEW
ME AWAY like nothing this year. Stunning is the word. Breathless is
another. Writing so sharp (Kanu Behl and Sharat Kataria co-wrote it) and
performances so bang-on, not to mention excellent edgy-gritty
cinematography (Siddharth Dewan), this is our best bet for world cinema
honors next year.

The Lunchbox made me long for the days
gone by, Ship of Theseus made me feel guilty for merely existing,
Chennai Express made me a philosopher, but the film that reached me this
year was a story about identity and liberation -Ajeeb Dastan hai yeh
(Bombay talkies). The film mainly dealt with identity – sexual and
personal both, but what worked for me was the depiction of today’s charulata
– hiding her loneliness and emptiness in sensuous saris wrapped in raw
sexuality. It was her story, her struggle and in the end, her
liberation. Trapped in a relationship moving slowly towards it’s end and
feeling guilty for it’s eventual demise. Use of Lag Ja Gale was genius
to say the least and felt like it was specifically written for this
character. And in what eloquent ease does Rani Mukherjee carries herself
throughout the film. And Johar, from loving your parents to hitting
your parents has come a long way and we can only hope he keeps this
bravado intact.

Before Midnight is the loveliest film I’ve seen all year but I’ve already written about it at length.
My second favourite film this year stands in stark contrast to the
occasionally sunny, sometimes stormy, yet entirely endearing story of
Richard Linklater’s finest film. “The Hunt” is a little-known Danish
film — despite it winning an award at Cannes 2012 — that stars the
reliably excellent Mads Mikkelsen in a mesmerising performance as an
upright schoolteacher, and occasional hunter, who is hounded and
ostracised by the small community he lives in, after a child wrongly,
but not maliciously, accuses him of a criminal act he did not commit.

Without talking about the accusation
itself, nor of the movie’s very finely shot and acted scenes, it’s worth
examining two key themes of the movie briefly. The first is banal but
has several important interlinked parts — children are impressionable,
difficult to understand, and can react unpredictably when spurned or
angered. In the movie, the child is shown a porn clip by her brash
teenaged elder brother. Later, when angered by the schoolteacher, she
uses details seen in it to accuse him of an act he did not commit,
without being aware of the fallout of her innocent anger. For some
reason, while watching the movie, I was constantly reminded of another
disturbing film in which an older child wreaks havoc on his family and
schoolmates: “We Need to Talk About Kevin”. That movie should perhaps be
watched in accompaniment to The Hunt for it sheer contrast in material.
Second, perceptions and influence work in strange, and sometimes
troubling ways. It is assumed that the child must obviously be speaking
the truth while making such serious accusations. The teacher-in-charge,
instead of trying to verify the story, literally puts words into the
mouth of the child in her haste to get “justice” for the child. It must
be noted that, in general, everyone knows that children are notorious
liars; yet for serious accusations this is often overlooked. Moreover,
the “epidemic” — of accusations of similar acts committed with other
children — that breaks out soon after the initial accusation points to
how impressionable children are, how vulnerable their minds and the
paradox that must exist to protect them: to ensure their safety there
must be inordinate power vested in their words. The hunt for truth and
justice often leads to the bloodshed of those who only happened to cross
the firing line at the wrong time. For a schoolteacher this lesson was
hard to swallow; for the hunter, it could not have been more obvious.

At the Kashish Mumbai International Film
Festival this year, the closing film Chitrangada was also one of the
festival’s most difficult films to sit through. Three days later,
actor-director Rituparno Ghosh was dead. The film, which is inspired by a
Tagore play, is about a transsexual choreographer undergoing
sex-reassignment surgery. In a way, it mirrors Rituparno’s own battles,
as he began to express himself more as a woman in the public eye.

This confusion in the audience to be able
to identify with him, is also the moot point the film makes when he
steps into the role of the agonising choreographer. Festival audience
moved quickly; the deadweight of the film’s slow treatment, and watching
this pouty, greasy, unattractive man blur the boundaries between art
and life, freaked most people. By the end of the screening, the theatre
was near empty. Which is clear how people do not want to see filmmakers
indulge in self-flagellation. Keep your private parts, private, don’t
turn it into something prosaic. Perhaps, Rituparno over-shot his
license.

It is however, a film, one must return
to, for the artist who holds a gun to his own head. The film bored me,
made me uncomfortable, there were long and dull portions, but what never
left me, was that in his role as ‘deus ex ghosh’, he was trying to say
something really, really important; about gender and bias and fluid
sexuality, and what films should do and tell us about ourselves
(sometimes). As Aparna Sen wrote about the film, in his obit,
‘Without sending out a message, within quotes, as a lesser filmmaker
might have done, Ritu managed to bring the hitherto marginalized into
the domain of the mainstream, to an extent.’ His timing was right, his
exit wrong.

Every year there is ‘the’ Tamil film
which crosses boundaries and turns out to be a benchmark. From previous
years’ Paruthiveeran, Subramaniapuram, to Aaranya Kaandam and this
year’s Soodhu Kavvum. This one shows how to do a Guy Ritchie-ish film
with dollops of quirky characterizations, outlandish situations, kickass
dialogues, and amazing usage of music. And the best part is that the
film is made with no stars (unless you count Sanchita Shetty &
Pizza’s Vijay Sethupathy- the Abhay Deol equivalent, as ‘stars’), and is
a realistic, ambitious, sensible film with zero pretension, with a dose
of commercial masala tadkas. Ambition needn’t be limited by a budget.
One might argue that the 2nd half was more ‘plot’ & less character
as compared to the 1st half, but still, no one can take away the fact
that the film surprises you at multiple levels without insulting your
intelligence.

[SPOILERS]- Ironically the only two
‘honest’ men in the film end up as losers and most of the bent
characters end up victorious. This one also has the greatest subversive
‘stalker’ scene in the history of tamil cinema (the IT guy with the
lover girl office situation). Now waiting and hoping the hindi remake
matches upto the original.

Trust the Koreans to make actors dressed
in black suit and assaulting each other with knives and baseball bats
look poetry in motion. The film explores the power politics within a
gang, primarily dealing with structures and mechanisms. It has unusual
emotional depth for a gangster film and often feels like a tale of
bromance and loyalty.

It is the perfect onion, unwrapping one
layer at a time as the film progress. The film teases the viewer to a
game of one-upmanship, trying to outdo each other. And just as we think
we have solved the maze, the climax flips everything upside down and we
gasp at the sheer brilliance of storytelling. But the film does not rely
on the last minute plot twist for the viewer to appreciate. It acts as
the cherry on top.

Jep Gambardella claims that he was
destined for sensibilities, whereas his friends cared only for inner
lips of women. He has walked a long path, arriving at a view of life
that gives him a panoramic display of the human comedy, broad and
unambiguous. He has lost love, but his nature hasn’t undergone a brutal
upheaval. He has been at war with himself; he’s the man who has been
different men at different points of time. He has emerged from the
uncertainties of life, remade, and illuminated by new feelings. Now,
whatever its worth, is fairly settled, and he knows how to express it
clearly, facing the camera, without a shadow of doubt, in true Italian
style.

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty
witnesses the decadence of Rome again, seething with tragic irony of a
Gibbonesque spectacle. It flings literature giants at you so elegantly
that you are waiting to be damned by its words. But unlike Woody Allen
(whom you actually expect to pop up at any moment in the film) whose
intellectual adventures merely give a half-formed philosophy in an
autobiographical fashion, Sorrentino’s characters reveal the inner
labyrinth of life, rather a satire of life, on life everywhere, the
struggle of its aspirations to fructify, the madness that follows it,
and the disillusionment that awaits at the far end of the journey. The
observations are sharp, but it is not cruel, rather it looks at poor
folks, baffled and lost, rarely comforted, with a distant sympathy. With
a rhythmic rise and fall of images (that gliding camera), Jep is the
voice of a time going by. He utters inconsistent wisdom, not because of
the character’s infidelity with truth, but because he has outgrown his
preceding selves. To know him, unquestionably one must know him entire,
and I can only fancy the aching romantic pain that sweeps his memory. As
2013 is flying by, I would rather settle for his terrace party,
swinging to ‘Mueve La Colita’.

“Nazis and holocaust bring awards” says
the head of ‘Miramount Pictures’ as he convinces Robin Wright, an ageing
star, to surrender her youth to a pile of codes.

Ari Folman’s The Congress is a dizzy
concoction of commoditization of cinema, the dystopian bleakness of our
future that is bereft of choice, the blazing bohemia of a century full
of animated characters and our relentless questioning of where we came
from. It’s a giant fuck you to the Hollywood’s studio system, an ode to
animation and eventually, an allegory of what our future holds for us
with all it’s decaying art.

Robin Wright plays herself as the star
who has to sign a contract with her studio to sell her image to digital
restoration turning her real self completely obsolete. 20 years later
she is called to the futurist congress, a convention of an animated
world, where she is forced to lend her image to the capitalistic
franchise of Mirmaount Hotel. The studio boss asks her for an extension
of her contract where she “can now be eaten in an omelette or a Crème
brûlée… you’re now a substance”. He even suggests her of a world where
people will pay royalty to fantasize about a star. More ambitious than
Waltz With Bashir but limiting in it’s cohesiveness of a singular theme,
The Congress, has to be devoured for it’s vision and craft. As it goes
with life, you may not understand this film completely but it is worth
the trip, with all its spot-the-reference moments. This is Sunset
Boulevard on acid!

Innocence is difficult to
portray without sentimentalising. Much more difficult is to weave in
that rare brotherly bond amidst poverty ridden circumstances yet steer
clear of patronising. Using children as children and letting their light
shine through requires talent, one which Bekas, a delightfully pleasing
and touching film, does without fanfare.

The story of two orphaned Kurd
children who dream of going to America and meeting Superman thereby
uplifting their impoverished lives, Bekas keeps coming back to me as the
most memorable film I have watched this year solely for its tone –
bantery humour with controlled drama underlining the narrative. Cleverly
drawing the line between sentiment, drama and comedy, Bekas turns a
feel-good narrative into a story of familial bond while set in the harsh
reality of war-torn Iraq. It has one of the most delightful and sharply
written lines, warmly etched characters and deeply insightful social
references of life in a small town in Kurd and the impact of the war
with US. The ghost of US merchandise symbolising the ‘arrived’ life
looms large in everything the two hold dear; Superman, Coke and Michael
Jackson become much more telling symbols of US supremacy globally.

All its little joys and the wonderful
child actor playing the younger, spirited brother apart, Bekas is dear
to me for its one brilliant achievement – of letting children be
children. From Majidi we have learnt, they tell their own story. All we
need to do is allow them to speak. And then just sit back and listen.

The Great Beauty, Inside Llewyn Davis,
Francis Ha, Before Midnight and Gravity must be the top five reasons to
fall in love with the movies this year. Wrote about Llewyn Davis and
Frances Ha here. So am picking a bengali film for this post.

This is my favourite story about the
oldest lady i know and i keep repeating it. She keeps reminding me that
on her deathbed she might ask for some non-vegetarian dish and she might
even force me to get it. She has seen people doing that. But she says i
should not let her eat that, not even offer anything remotely
non-vegetarian. She hasn’t tasted it in last 70-75 years. She doesn’t
want to change that in her last minutes. She says these things happen on
deathbed. When you haven’t tasted something for so long, that intense
craving comes back in your last moments and it feels like that’s the
only door to salvation. She married young, widowed young, and since then
it’s been like that – white saree, no non-vegetarian, and some more
restrictions. Because of social and religious norms initially, and then
you accept it and refuse to let it go. And i keep joking that i will get
her the best kebabs she wants, she should die peacefully at least.

Aparna Sen bravely went ahead and gave
her character something more to chew on in her film, Goynaar Baksho
(GB). A story involving three generations of women, and the one that
stood out is about a widow with a bitter tongue, who becomes ghost and
returns to her house to guard her jewellery box. Our cinema has made
some people completely invisible. Once upon a time, the woman in white
saree used to be there for ornamental purpose at least. But they are
completely extinct from screen these days. In GB, the old widow with her
acidic tongue and funny bone encourages the young woman to look for
real love by breaking all the social norms, even though it’s 1940s rural
Bengal. But when she gets emotional and talks about the love that she
has missed, has forgotten what cuddling with lover feels like, that
physical intimacy, and how she was fooled into believing that
materialistic pleasure was enough when the men of the house enjoyed life
to the fullest, you can’t help but feel guilty and teary-eyed. For
being conditioned by the same society norms in such a way that you never
thought about this aspect of that lady in white.

It’s a ghostly tale told in a funny tone
with freedom movement in the background, and has terrific performances
by Moushumi Chatterjee and Konkona Sen Sharma. At a time when gender
crime is making headlines every day, and when most of our films still
treats female leads as T&A prop, this one stands so tall. Get the
dvd and watch it.